 Hello everyone. Welcome to this workshop brought to you by learn.wordpress.org. My name is Courtney, and I'm here with with Hari, and we will be presenting Five for the Future, How to Succeed by Making Ongoing Contributions to WordPress. And what exactly is Five for the Future? What can it do for you? What can it do for your organization? And yeah, we, let's just dive right in. Let's start with this great comic from XKCD. So if you're not familiar with XKCD, this is a web comic. It's been running for a long time. They touch on a variety of topics, but it's largely about programming, math, and science. And I think in the description, they say like, and love, but I think that's a bit, a little bit in a joking way. So this particular comic that you see on your screen is one that we as open source contributors can relate a lot to. So the idea behind this comic is that the infrastructure of the web that you see this big complicated thing here, that the infrastructure is sustained by open source contributors that are volunteering your time. So this random person in Nebraska that's been thankfully maintaining since 2003, this little tiny thing that's just holding up the entire infrastructure of the web. So, you know, this comic is, of course, a little bit of a joke, but it does make volunteer contributors like us laugh because it feels like our reality. It's funny because it's true. And so next we have this article or this report that was, it's an open source security and risk analysis report that was published in 2022. So this states that 88% of code bases contained components that had no new development in the past two years. And they were behind with user updates. So this problem, this presents some serious security issues. And why is that? So think about the many contributors that volunteer their time that are working on these things. Do they have the bandwidth to keep maintaining these components? So that's, that could be the reason why this is happening. And I see Harry's sharing links in the chat. Thank you. So this is an example of what we're just talking about. So this article here is about CoreJS, which is an open source project that is a very popular library. It's a part of almost every major website. And I believe Harry said, let's like even Netflix runs on it. So unfortunately, the developer and maintainer of CoreJS is going broke. He's running out of money. So he's been considering making this open source project in a closed source or commercial project. So this is a very familiar problem that volunteer contributors that, yeah, the volunteer contributors are not unfamiliar with this kind of situation. And what can we do to fix this problem? Any thoughts on that? So this slide here is about the tragedy of the commons. So the tragedy of the commons is what's happening here and all over the open source community. It's a social and political problem in which each individual is programmed to act in a way that will ultimately be harmful to all individuals. So this comic demonstrates the concept of the tragedy of the commons. So there are a lot of people overusing a shared resource like water. And that results in a tragedy for everyone when the resource gets completely depleted. So people that are using up all the resources and not giving back, it just gets depleted and everyone is now out of water. So in order for the commons to be sustained, it needs to work. It needs work and support from its community. So of course, that brings us WordPress. So so far we've been generally talking about open source projects. So we're going to specifically apply this to WordPress. So in 2014, Matt Mullenweg, who is the co-founder of WordPress, wrote this blog post that's linked here. And I know Harry will probably share a link in the chat. He wrote this blog post to introduce the concept of five for the future to the WordPress community. He proposed this idea of five for the future as a potential solution to avoid the tragedy of commons in WordPress. He proposed that organizations and companies that have built their companies and products around WordPress for them to dedicate 5% of their people back to WordPress. That brings us to five for the future. So the little bit of history about five for the future. The idea started in 2017 at the WordPress Community Summit, which took place in Paris right around the time of WordCamp Europe. There were contributors Tracy Levec and Ian Dunn proposed the idea of formalizing five for the future as an official program for the WordPress community. And with the help of the community, the program was defined and formalized in 2018. And the first trial run of the program with dedicated teams sponsored by companies happened in 2019. So you can access the website for five for the future at this URL. And you can easily load it by scanning this QR code, of course. And this is a screenshot on the right of what the site looks like. The five for the future program is an attempt to avoid the tragedy of commons in WordPress. So this program is what we're here to talk about today. We're going to demystify five for the future, share some ideas for individual contributors or self-funded contributors on how they can contribute to WordPress. We'll also share some ideas on how companies can contribute to five for the future and some perceived benefits that companies can get from contributing. And finally, we'll share some ideas on where this program needs to go in the future. So now I will hand this off to Hari to talk about what a five for the future contribution is. Thank you, Courtney. Hey, thank you. Thank you, Courtney. Hello, everybody. So thank you for explaining so very well about what five for the future is and why this is needed. So let's move on to the next slide. So what is five for the future contribution? Essentially any direct contribution that you do to the work of a make WordPress team is a five for the future contribution. So all that leaves us with a bit of questions like what is make WordPress and what is contribution? So as Courtney mentioned, WordPress is an open source project which powers 40% of the internet. And it is built by volunteer contributors all over the world. It's not built by one person. It's not built by one company, but it is built by volunteer contributors all over the world. So how is this being built? There's so many ways to contribute to WordPress, but anything that you do to support WordPress is a contribution. But there are some contributions that are more impactful. And these contributions are the contributions that are most impactful to WordPress. Those are five for the future contributions. And we go on to the next slide, please. So that brings us to make WordPress. I briefly mentioned make WordPress. So there's a website, make.wordpress.org. This is where the contribution to WordPress happens, essentially. There are different teams to contribute to WordPress. There's teams like core, design, mobile, accessibility, community, training. So this session that you're in, it's organized by the training team as part of learn.wordpress.org. There's different make teams. I believe around 17, 18, I forget the latest number because the number keeps changing. So there's so many of these make teams out there. And any work that you do to support this make team, any make team in this list, in the list that Courtney shared in chat, that is a five for the future contribution. So again, as I said again, there's so many ways to contribute to WordPress, not just by contributing to this team, but the contributions that you make to any of these teams. For instance, if you take the core team, if you contribute core to WordPress, that's what core does. So there's a design team, which is where we help design WordPress. So that's a contribution to the design team. Similarly, if you help organize WordPress events, official WordPress events as part of a WordPress meetup, or if you organize a work camp, that's a contribution to the community. And if you help organize a learn.wordpress workshop like this one, that's a contribution to the training team. So any work that you do to support any of these make teams, that is a five for the future contribution. Can we move on to the next slide please? So exactly that. Every contribution to WordPress supports it. So there's no contribution pullings out there. So even if you talk to your friend about WordPress, or maybe even if you're building a WordPress site, that's contribution in one way or the other. Or let's say you're helping your friend build a WordPress website, or I don't know, you're posting about WordPress and social media, you're advocating for WordPress and social media. That's a contribution in one way or the other. So anything that you do to support those open source software and enabling the open web really, that is a contribution. Where five for the future stands out is the impact of your contribution because like you're literally helping build WordPress. So the summary of what I'm saying is five for the future contributions, they help sustain the WordPress project directly. Can you have the next slide? Thank you. So I built a small chart over here which you can see and it shows the impact that you have of your contribution. So let's start from the bottom. So external contributions towards what could, what could those be? Do you believe that WordPress websites for clients? Is that a contribution? Perhaps it is because like, so you're, you're kind of, even, even if you're doing this to help somebody or even if you're doing this with a commercial intent, you're actually improving the WordPress market sense that it is a contribution in one way or the other. Even if you're writing WordPress blog posts on WordPress, because like you're helping, you're helping you're encouraging the ecosystem or even if you're evangelizing WordPress, it does have a, it does have a very reasonable impact to WordPress. You are helping WordPress in one way or the other. Moving up, I mean, of course you are seeing WordPress plugins and WordPress teams and right now we have blocks which are amazing. So if you're helping create them, that definitely has a more, has a higher impact when compared to just building websites or sharing about WordPress, right? So that is valuable. That is definitely valuable. It goes a long way for putting WordPress. If that's something, that's how you want to contribute to WordPress, go for it. It's a great way. You can, you actually help sustain this ecosystem. So WordPress is not just WordPress open source software. There's an entire ecosystem around it, which revolves around plugins and themes because WordPress can be extended as many of you know. So definitely that is a major contribution. But as you can see right on the top of this list, we have pipe for the future contributions. So what are they? I shared about make.wordpress.org. Make.wordpress.org have different teams and working on make team projects. So in anything that you do to support any of these make teams. So each of these make teams, so let's say make code, when I say make teams, I'm referring to the different teams in make.wordpress.org. So literally anything that you do to support any of those teams, that has the highest impact. And these are what we call pipe for the future contributions. So it could be anything. Like if you look at the community team, it's organizing WordPress events. So did you know that when you're organizing a WordPress meetup, you are actually contributing to WordPress? Yes, you are. And it is one of the most, it is a type of contribution that has the highest impact. If you contribute documentation to WordPress as part of the docs team, again, that has the highest impact. If you contribute code to WordPress, yes. So in fact, Courtney and I, we are actually contributing to WordPress by organizing this meetup in this event, this online workshop as part of the training team. So anything that you do to support a make team, that is a pipe for the future contribution. And I will talk about this more, but the five of the five for the future contribution is the five percent is not, is not a mandatory requirement. There's no five for the future police. We'll get to that in a bit. But the short version is anything, anyway, anything, anything that you can do to support these teams in your free time, that is definitely valuable. Any contribution is impactful as well. Can you model next slide? All right. So let's quickly take a look at how we can pledge our time for five for the future. Next slide, please. Yeah. So there's two ways to do it. So if you're an individual contributor, you can actually edit your WordPress.org profile. How many folks here have a WordPress.org profile? If there's anybody who doesn't, you can go to, I can maybe share the link in chat as well. There's a link on login.wordpress.org slash register. In case you do not have one, you can just go to this link and create a WordPress.org profile. So in your, once you create your profile, there's a contribution section out there. And there you can actually, you know, dedicate your time and the team or teams that you'd like to contribute to. So once you do that, it shows up in your profile. Can you have the next slide, please? So that is, that is how you contribute individually. So there's two ways to do it. One, you can, one you can contribute individually as a volunteer or as an individual contributor. Secondly, if you are an entrepreneur, if you are, if you run a company, you can actually pledge to WordPress as a company. This is, this website, WordPress.org slash type, or you can also access using the QR code. If there's a, there's a link called for organizations on the top in this website. I'm not sure if the screenshot is very clear, but if you visit this link, you will actually, you actually get to sign up as a company. So you can, you can pledge to WordPress as a company. And again, like the 5% is purely aspiration. You do not need to contribute 5%. It's just a guideline, right? For smaller agencies, 5% might be fine, but anything that you can do. So I don't know if this page is clear, but if you, if you go to that link, you will be able to see it. You can actually list your company and you can list the number of folks that you want to contribute to from your company. You can just add their profiles. You can list it amount of time. So that they themselves can specify the amount of time they want to contribute, the teams that they want to contribute. Can you have the next slide, please? Yeah. So it shows up, there's a pledges page which shows up like this. And then, so your company gets listed in this, in this page. At this point, I believe there's around 140 companies, 140, 140 companies from all over the world who have pledged to support WordPress. So you can add a brief description of your company. It shows the number of contributors that you have from each company and shows that they've pledged to work. So there's a pledging page which currently shows that each company has a certain number of people who've pledged to support WordPress. So that's how the pledging works. Next slide, please. So that brings us to the question. Why should we really pledge to fight for the future? What is the benefits of pledging to fight for the future? And I guess the simple answer there is, it's in the next slide. So can you have the next slide, please? Because contributing to WordPress can help you succeed. And that is exactly why we are here. Because in this session, we hope to guide you through some ways where the contribution can actually help folks. Yes. So if you think about it, and this was the original intent of Fight for the Future itself, because Fight for the Future was envisioned as a way to help WordPress. But did you know that any contribution that you make for the WordPress open source software can actually help you, either if you are an individual contributor or a volunteer, or if you run an organization or if you're a part of an organization. But that's what we are trying to coordinate and I am trying to cover in this session. We hope to do so by that. And I would like to hand over to Courtney to explain how companies or how individuals and companies can benefit from Fight for the Future. Over to you, Courtney. Yeah. Thanks, Hari. So yeah, Hari mentioned. In this next part of the presentation, we're going to talk about how Fight for the Future can help individuals. And then after that, we'll talk about how Fight for the Future can help companies and organizations. So yeah, let's start with individual contributors. So one of the greatest benefits, in my opinion, and I think of many people's opinion, is that you get to work alongside talented contributors from all over the world. For example, I mean, Hari is on the other side of the world for me in India, and I'm here in Hawaii in the US. It is the end of my day. It's the being of his day. And it's just amazing that we get to work with folks from all over the world. And yeah, like I said, talented contributors from all over the world. So the experience that you gain, the ideas that you exchange, and the opportunities that you get by interacting with all these contributors is absolutely priceless. So what you see is here pictured on the right is the list of contributors for WordPress 6.1.1. So even you can be part of lists like this if you contribute. So this is a screenshot to a great article that was published by Justin Tadlock on WP Tavern in 2021, titled Contributing to Open Source is better than any college degree. So although this might not be the truth for everyone, both Hari and I are great examples of this. You can learn so much by putting your contributions out there. You're learning by doing, you're making mistakes and learning to fix them, you're building things and all alongside people all over the world. And all at no monetary cost to you. When you contribute to WordPress, your WordPress.org profile or GitHub profile and or GitHub profile, this becomes your resume actually. So currently the meta team is working hard to bring as many contributions as possible to WordPress.org profiles. They did a lot of great work and as a result, any translation that a contributor does will show up in their profile. So there's a lot of information there in the profile that really helps anyone viewing it identify the work that you've been doing. Okay, you can definitely write a long resume if you want, but demonstrating that you have open source contributions, it shows tangible proof of your work and it really stands out. So when you apply for a job, especially for a WordPress based company, when you have open source contributions to show, they really speak for you. So here this simple chart is a very brief contributor journey in the WordPress project. So most, if not all people will start out as a user and some will move on to becoming casual contributors. Some people pledge themselves to fight for the future. And when you pledge or contribute consistently, you'll have a greater chance of becoming a leader or expert in the project. And being that leader really brings you some professional advantages. Contributing can be also be helpful in this time of economic slowdown because this gives you an opportunity as an individual to become a leader or expert in your field by contributing. And finally, on a lighter note, contributing to an open source project like WordPress can give you bragging rights. I'm not personally one for bragging and this project is full of humble folks. But honestly, it's not a bad thing to bring your accomplishments to light. It's pretty cool to say that you've been a part of building the software that runs over 40% of the web. So we just talked about the benefits of fight for the future for individuals. So let's take a look at how it can help companies and organizations. So as I mentioned earlier for individuals, open source contributions are a great way to gauge someone's talents and that they do good work. So for recruiters or people that are hiring, it actually makes their job easier. When you're in the business of creating WordPress-based products, contributing will help you keep up to date on what is happening in WordPress. So by contributing to WordPress, companies get a great idea on where the project is headed, which will allow making better business decisions and will support the overall growth of their company. For those that run agencies, you know what your clients want. You can actually speak for your clients to the WordPress project and you can make changes in the project with your expertise. Companies contributing to Fight for the Future have a recognition in the WordPress project and you can use the opportunity to represent their needs and the client needs in the decision-making process. Companies can also use this opportunity to find growth opportunities along with WordPress. And finally, when your company contributes to WordPress, it establishes your credibility. So oftentimes we've seen many agencies that contribute to WordPress gain more work in clients because they were core contributors or they've been involved in the WordPress community. So it's definitely a credential, especially for a small agency or company, because when you're involved in the project, it shows the expertise that you have and the results for your business are immense. So next I'll be handing this off again to Hari to talk about some tips for contributing. Thank you, Courtney. So I hope that kind of convinced you about the benefits that you get from contributing to WordPress. And yes, to reiterate, WordPress is an open-source project and it powers 40% of the Internet. And yes, we did talk about the tragedy of the comments, which is very important. So in my mind, I see contribution as a two-way street. Like you support WordPress and WordPress supports you. And that is the hope behind the Fight for the Future program. So as we've learned about what we can get by contributing and how we can support this project, let's take a look at how this works back to me. So again, these are just very broad guidelines and we're not going specifically because of the lack of time. We only have one hour and we don't really go beyond that. So what I hope to do here is to share with you a framework of how both individual contributors or self-sponsored contributors can support the open-source project and how if you're running a company or an agency, how you can also be a part of this program. Some tips on how this can, because folks have already asked some questions on how this goes. The first thing to keep in mind is to start slow, like really. So when you hear about a program like this, there's always the feeling that you need to sort of leap or march ahead. So let's be honest, WordPress contributions, especially for some teams like Core is hard. To start real slow, especially if you're in, so let's start with individual contributors first of course. So if you're an individual contributor, it makes sense to start slow. Identify what you really want to work on. Like what are your skill sets? What do you really know? So what can Europe and even work in Asia? I had a contributor orientation tool. I am working with teams to hopefully bring this to make WordPress fingers crossed. So if that happens, it would be great if we really help folks to new contributors to identify which teams that they want to work on. But until then, think about what you want to do, which are the areas that you want to develop. So let's say, if you want to learn development, the core team, the meta team, even learn WordPress, so the training team. So these are some teams that you can learn. So resources which you can use. But other than that, like, there are different teams which you can use according to your skills. So if you want to learn development, the core team, the meta team, and I guess there are some other teams like Openverse or even CLI. So there's so many of these co-related teams out there. If you are a marketing person, there's a dot org marketing team, so you can actually help market the WordPress project. If you're a community person, you can work on the community. Or if you want to learn project management, like running events, there's a community team. If teaching is your thing, or if you really know about a particular subject, and if you want to sort of expand that knowledge and from the gain by presenting events like this, that's the training thing. So think about all that and start real slow. So go to that team's website and start working on. Can I have the next slide, please? Yeah. So the first place you might want to start, so once you've decided which team that you want to contribute on, contribute to, go to make.wordpress.org. Check out their handbook. So every team has a handbook, every make team has a handbook. And most of these teams have a new contributor guide. I'm going to be real honest with you folks. The information that we have out there is a bit overwhelming. It's totally fine. I am actively working on, it's my full-time job. I'm actually working on trying to simplify it and to sort of build processes around simplifying all this. But until we have, until we have a simpler version of all the onboarding right now, but we still have, all make teams still have excellent handbooks and excellent documentation thanks to the great work of contributors all over the world. So whichever team that you want to work on. So the screenshot here is from the core team. There's a handbook page out there. Check the handbook and every team has an onboarding page for that team. So the training team has an excellent training team onboarding page. Similarly, the core also has that. So go through that page. It offers some guidance on how to start. Can you have the next slide please? So once you've gone through that, or if you're not 100% aware of, if that didn't really give you a good idea of how to do things, the next thing that you can do is to join the team step. So if you go to every make WordPress team, there's usually a bar on the top which says, when the next team chapters. There's also a site called make.wordpress.org slash meetings, which shares the list of all the upcoming meetings for the team that you want to work on. And for this, you need to join the make.wordpress slack if you haven't already. Once you're on the chat, join the team slack channel. So that's, you need to do a couple of things, which I don't think I've mentioned, my apologies. So definitely follow the team's P2 or the blog, make.wordpress.org slash core. If you want to contribute to core, then you might want to join the team's slack channel. So in case of core, we are using core as the example, join the slack channel. And each team has a chat. The chat usually happens on a bi-weekly, bi-weekly as in once every two weeks or a monthly basis usually. So join the chat and like, so the chat happens in slack, in the slack channel, the text chat, which is open. It's for anybody to join. It's a great way to be familiar with how the team works. And you can actually introduce yourself. You get a space to introduce yourself. You can say, hey, I'm new here. So you will see that there's so many folks out there to help you. You can ask them for guidance. Now, in case of some teams like the core team, they specifically have a new contributor onboarding set. So if you're very new and you do not know what to do, you can join one of these sets. So folks here who want to contribute to core, I would strongly recommend joining the new contributor chat. It's not a great time zone for APEC. For me, I think it's like 2.30 a.m. in the Indian time zone. I live in India. But if you are able to make that chat, it's a great way to get onboarded to that team. Any more to the next slide please? So once you go through the handbook and once you get guidance in your chat, try to make your first contribution. So making that first contribution is really, really important. It could be difficult, but again, you can get help from the team members in either the make chats, either the chats that you participate in, or the new contributor chats. And go ahead and make that first contribution. So once you make that first contribution, Kuros, once you've done that, my advice would be to try and keep repeating it. So even if you spend one hour per week, or if even if that's too much, one hour per month, try to do it for the next month. So I'm not sure if you've heard about this. Currently, I'm a huge fan of productivity and motivation and all that. So there's a book called Atomic Habits and the Power of Habits. And there was actually a blog post in the, actually a podcast episode in the WordPress blog by Joseph Hayden, the executive director of the WordPress project, where she talks about the value of routines and really pointing fingers to that. So routines and habits are really important and really helpful as well. So if you can build some time to do contribution, it need not be like a particular timing. It totally depends on you on your schedule because every person works differently. So if you can find some time each week, I wouldn't say each day because I know all of us are busy, we all have work to do, but if we can find some time to regularly contribute to WordPress, if you really enjoy doing that, why don't you try doing it again and again? It could be anything. You can start by, so if you are not very sure about how things are, you can join the team steps. That's a great way to stay updated with things. And once you make that contribution, consider making that again and again. So having that habit, it really pays off because the more you contribute, the more you learn about those things and the more impact that you can make. I also want to be really honest here because at this point, contributions to some teams could be hard and it might take a while to be 100% on boarded, but nonetheless, once you make your first contribution, the process gets a lot easier and you will also learn things in the process and you can slowly on board to keep making more contributions. And we have the next slide, please. So I've briefly explained the process of succeeding as an individual contributor. So how this journey, I think Kodme shared an excellent slide before of how the journey progresses as you start as an individual contributor and you grow as a leader. So once you start making habitual contributions and again, you do not invest a lot of your time on this, it's absolutely not mandatory at all. Any small contribution pays off, but if you are able to do it habitually and in a consistent manner, that really helps and it helps you grow in the project. So you learn certain skills as you contribute and it helps you grow as well and it brings you a chance of being a leader in the project. So we've quickly gone through the process of contributing individually. Let's now take a look at how we can contribute as a company. Next slide, please. So if you're running an agency or if you're running a company and it could be anything, it could be an agency, you could be, you could be selling WordPress plugins, Supremes, whatever. The first thing that you need to do is to set a strategy. So we saw some of the benefits of contributing to WordPress. What are you really looking for? And it would help to ask yourself some open questions on this, but really think about think about your why. Why do you really want to contribute? I mean, of course, like you want to support WordPress, which is amazing, but other than that, like, what would you like to get out of it? Any of the next slide, please. So in order to build your strategy, I've set aside some open questions here and again, this also applies to individual contributors because of all the benefits that we spoke of. What are your goals? What do you and how can contribution help you achieve this? And how, which make teams aligned with your company values? It also applies to individuals and which skill sets match your make team. So you're an agency and you have employees working on different skill sets. And where do their interests fit in? And is there anybody from your team who's already contributing to WordPress? You never know. When this happens a lot, I've spoken to many company, many agency owners and I, many of them actually have employees contributing to WordPress, which they did not know about. Perhaps there's already somebody already doing this and you can actually support them. And based on what you have, where can you make the most impact? And finally, there's the most important part. And again, all of these applies to individuals as well. But how much time can you dedicate to contributions for you? I will say this again, but the 5% or 5% for the future is purely aspirational. It's not a guideline, it's not a requirement. You're not by pledging, you're not required to say, but like it helps to, you know, actually set aside the time that you can contribute. And so think about all these questions, like ask yourself all these questions, even if you're an individual contributor or if you're a company and sort of build a strategy around it. So these are the, this is the first thing that you should do as an agency owner, or even as an individual contributor in the next slide please. So again, I will say the same thing which I shared for individual contributors, start small. You can, so you can, you know, in order to march ahead, you need to start at a very slow pace. So again, the same things, like depending on which teams that you want to contribute, start by slowly looking at the things you do and dedicating a few folks, get them to you know, attend the team meetings and learn the, learn the ropes of the basically learn how contribution works. And if you're not familiar, and then slowly, slowly start console, it could, if you're looking at core, maybe start looking at making small patches, if you're looking at community, maybe I guess get your folks involved in their local meetups or very small or the community has different projects for the community. And if you're looking at training, training has so many tasks for new contributors. So each team has like task specific for new contributors. So maybe look at them next slide please. And as you've slowly tested the waters, you can gradually scale up. So how does this work? Definitely as contributors get more involved in their teams. So the benefit here is your contributors or your employees are actually contributing in their work time. So they are, if they work for 40 hours a week, they may be spending one hour or two hours depends on how you're planning your contributions. Again, this is all part of the strategy that you build. How do you want to do? Do you want to dedicate an employee full time to contribute to WordPress? Do you want to maybe dedicate two or three hours per person to contribute to WordPress? Totally up to you. So based on how you build this process, get them to slowly start contributing. And once they've made the first contribution, slowly consider scaling up. So these are some things that you can do. Definitely whoever's contributing, get them to share some of their learnings internally. I mean, many WordPress companies, including the company that I work for, we work remotely. So we have systems where we share learnings internally, internal blocks, that's what we do. So get folks to share about what they learned to contributions, maybe in a periodic basis, that's very helpful. And so when folks work on contributions, be really mindful of the time they spend on this, because this is the time that they could use for crime work. And that's very valuable. So as they know that, please get them to note down the contributions that they make as well, and definitely celebrate them. So somebody's made their first core patch. Fantastic. So maybe you could do something like at the end of the month, you could celebrate when a release comes out, you could do a small party. Even a virtual one would be fantastic to celebrate their contributions. And definitely knowledge sharing. So as folks contribute, they learn so much. So how about doing internal learn up where folks who contribute to WordPress share the knowledge that they've built. And as this process goes, as you have some folks from your company contributing to WordPress, if you feel up for it, if you totally feel up for it, again, no requirement, you could maybe consider building a contribution to you. Maybe a couple of folks in your company, they could be part of a small team, which is because they spend a certain part of their time contributing to WordPress. So if this really works out for you and if you really see the benefit, that's something you can definitely consider. And a couple more ideas. So fight for the future is a learning opportunity. When folks pledge their time and contribute to a team, it's an opportunity for them to learn. So when you have, when you get new hires or when you want to train somebody, they can actually be trained by being on a rotation for contribution. So maybe somebody spends like three months contributing to core and they come back and they share the learning to the team. And when they do that, they learn so many things. They learn WordPress coding standards. They are very familiar with how things work. So if they're a developer, they get better at what they do. That doesn't make sense. Similarly, if somebody works on the community team or they help in organizing a big WordPress event, and they learn so much about project management, they learn so much about interacting with people, they learn so much about cross-cultural communication. Same with the training team or the docs team. So basically any making. So consider having rotations for your employees because it's a great way for them to learn things. And if you really see benefits in this, if you're really seeing a solid business case in contributing to WordPress, you can always consider hiring full-time developers. I would not recommend that for everybody because like I'm very mindful that many agencies, they, I mean, you yourself have a lot of work to do, but if you really see a business case for it, it's a great idea. And WordPress absolutely needs help because we have beyond 40% of the internet and there's so many projects. So if you, if you are up for it, it will definitely help WordPress and can help you as well. So can we have the next slide please? Again, I've mentioned this a few times in this session already because I want to be, I want to say that again, again, again, then I want to really highlight this. So the 5% of 5 for the future is aspiration. Any contribution that you can offer is valuable. So as a company or as an individual, if you can only contribute for 30 minutes or let's say 15 minutes every month, that is valuable. Even if one employee in your company organizes, does contributes one translation per month for the polyglot team, that is valid. There is, and this is my favorite side of this entire presentation. Like literally, I will say this again and again and again, there is no 5% for the future please. This is an open source project. Nobody's policing anybody. You can contribute as much as you want because this project needs your help. This is an open source project. It's not built by a company. And this, we go, throwing back to the Courtney's slide from that XKC comic, like the internet, 40% of the internet when we speak about WordPress is powered by contributors like you. So, and anybody working on contributor experience is only working on empowering you. There's no police. Nobody's policing anything. But anything that you can do to support the project is absolutely valuable. And even if it's a small contribution, it's absolutely valid. And again, to repeat this, any contribution is valuable, not just 5% for the future, but impact the benefit of 5% for the future is that it has a direct impact on the project. And the way you support the project, the actual impact you see is immense. Can you move on to the next slide please? So, we've covered a few things already. Let's finally wrap up by looking at where this project is headed. So, we saw what 5% for the future is. We saw the benefits of contributing. We looked at some tips for individual contributors and companies. Let's see where this project is going in the future. Any other next slide please? So, Courtney mentioned this, but the meta theme of WordPress, they are working on recording more and more contributions. So, you would have noticed that in 2022, if you contribute a translation, choose a previous profile. Also, any contributions that you make to the WordPress GitHub repository that shows up currently. So, more and more contributions are automatically recorded. So, previously that was not happening. And the team is continuing to work on that. Hopefully, in the days to come, we will see more and more automatic recording of contributions. And the second point is very important. I touched upon this. So, currently when you pledge, you don't get any additional specific benefits because you don't get any specific onboarding to WordPress. And actually, folks should get that, right? Because as a company or as an individual, you're actually when you pledge, you do that because you're serious about your contribution. You want to make recording contributions, right? So, hopefully, there will be a place, there will be a system where there will be some sort of onboarding. So, I am currently working on a project to build mentorship around WordPress. So, this being done as part of the contributor working group of the main WordPress community, it's an experiment to see if we can provide more onboarding. It's focused on volunteer contributors, but for the future, pledges can also join. And definitely, specific contribution resources for companies. So, currently, we don't, companies or individuals even don't have resources on how they can structure their contributions. So, we'll have more of that, more documentation, more guidance. And definitely, at this point, if you pledge as a company, you don't directly interact with main WordPress leaders. So, there needs to be more of those liaison, which is something that this program will have. And five of the future companies themselves are not very well connected. So, connecting them together is also, you know, that's something that's where the project is going. And going back to the core JS slide that's Courtney spoke of, there is a situation in our project where many volunteers, they're looking for sponsorship. They're contributing their free time, and especially as we are entering this economic slowdown, folks might need more support for contributions. So, hopefully, we will have a space where volunteer contributors will have sponsorship opportunities available in a more open way. Folks will get the chance to be sponsored. And at least that's the future that I'm envisioning. And finally, you'll be looking at this bright future where sponsored contributors support volunteer. So, a bulk of, I would say a majority of project is supported by folks who are not sponsored, who work on their free time. And they could use a lot of help. Like, in addition to the sponsorship opportunities, they could use guidance and mentorship. The mentorship project that I spoke of is something that it's trying to, you know, sort of like bridge that gap where sponsored contributors actually come to support volunteer contributors because they are just as important. This is the future that five of the future is headed. So, in an ideal world, we will have a program where companies get all the help they need to build a contribution program and benefit from it. So, that's where five of the future is headed. I think you can move on to the next slide. So, yeah, that's that's all we wanted to chat about today. There's a bunch of resources out here. It's, I think, in chat, the link in chat as well. And maybe we can keep this slide open for a while now, like, share the links below. But that's it. Thank you so much. Go to you, Courtney. Yeah, we'll be sharing these, these slides so you'll have access to these links. So, this will be provided alongside the recording that will be posted on WordPress.tv. Oh, yeah. Thank you. Thank you for being here today. So, yeah, well, we can open this up to questions. We have some ways to keep in touch on this slide. So, if you'd like to connect in any of these ways, please feel free. So, we'll go ahead and open up to any questions. If there are any questions, you know, it takes a minute to type if you're typing. Yeah. So, Sally says, really glad to hear about the mentorship and onboarding plans. Yes. This is the future. So, as you're waiting for questions, I just want to add a quick one. So, if anybody, anyone here really wants to know more about contributions, so there's this email out there, get involved, WordPress.org, please feel free to drop an email. If you're a, if you're running an organization or a company and you would like to, you know, get to know how to be more involved, or if you need help with building a contribution strategy, which we spoke of in this session, please drop an email. You can even ping me because this is what I do for time. Like, I work on supporting for the future companies and versions. I am more than happy to help you do this. So, you can either drop an email there or ping me. I'm there in the make WordPress like my name is Hari Shankar. Like, that's my ID. So, feel free to ping me. I'm more than happy to help. And even if you're an individual contractor looking for guidance on where to work, how to work, I can maybe offer you some guidance. I'm not an expert. I'll be very clear. I'm not a developer myself, but I can point you to the right direction. I can connect you with the right people. So, just want to share that with them. Yes, that's important. Well, we haven't seen any questions come in, but I wanted to thank you, Hari, for sharing all of your knowledge and supporting this project and kicking it into a high year for the future. I think this is a really great way to support WordPress and I hope more people get involved. And thank you, Courtney, for being such an excellent person. You did a fantastic job. I really enjoyed how you shared everything. It was amazing. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed participating in this as well. That's great. Thank you. Appreciate it. Yeah. And again, we do these workshops as a contribution to the training team. So, if you have any kind of WordPress-related topic that you want to share your knowledge on, we're happy to help you make those sessions happen, even if it's for your local meetup. Or if you want to do it for the Learn WordPress community and have it posted on WordPress.tv. We'd love to have you share your knowledge with the community. So, yeah, getting that. Looks like we don't have any questions. It must mean that our presentation was very clear. Yeah, thank you all for being here. Thank you.